It was a reference to the one time they’d actually played Truth or Dare, on their third date. They were at a friend’s house uptown and after dinner someone suggested it, almost ironically, though then they all threw themselves into the game. Dare was the preference. These were her friends, which is to say not a daring group rather one prone to privacy and discretion. Dares for them felt illicit. His friends would all have opted for Truth, they had enough real risk in their lives and their art. Things escalated and started to get racy which made the wives nervous. On his turn Anna’s husband stood up, raised his hand, and said defiantly—he was the first one—“Truth.” His answer to the question, Are you in love, was to walk over to Anna and kiss her, look her right in the eyes, and say, “Truth that.” And then he said, Let’s go home, which he knew was what she really wanted. Later, lying in bed, he’d taken her hand and placed it over his heart.
“Truth this,” he said.
The day they’d arrived home from the Cap, he had called her from the office.
“Truth or dare.”
“Truth,” she said, always her preference.
“I sold the baby.”
The company, the baby, it was done.
“It’s over,” he said, and she didn’t ask the number, she could guess by the sound of his voice. Before she could tease with a question, like, “Does it mean freedom?” he added, “Let’s run away together.”
Let’s run away together is what he would have said first had she said, “Dare.”
Q.
A.
Ask someone on the outside of East Asia, but within the directorate, and they will say that East Asia has a terrible reputation. It’s like the Ching dynasty, they’ll say. It’s a bowl of snakes. They will say East Asia officers treat their chief like an emperor. I would say in East Asia you simply go through the chain. I have a friend in Africa division who calls his chief on his cell phone. He goes to his chief’s house for breakfast, and for Christmas dinner. He brings girlfriends to his chief and asks for his blessing. Chief East Asia will never meet my girlfriends. I don’t have his number. And I highly doubt he celebrates Christmas.
In East Asia every door is always closed and our cubicle walls extend to the ceiling. Africa division looks like the New York Times newsroom, there is freedom and there is chaos, like Africa. If an East Asia guy walked into that division he would panic, all that sharing of information. And in Latin America they sit around like, Do we really think the Guatemalans have scored a coup and recruited an Agency guy? No, let’s go drinking. It can take a long time to ensure your place in China Ops, though once on the inside, I was immediately embraced. I had the right teacher.
Nobel.
Happiness was the topic at the table that night, a black-tie dinner at a midtown club. Anna grew up on these dinners and in these clubs, though she was invited now not because of her father but because of her husband, who had developed an unexpected and ardent interest in politics. The baby sale had awakened something in him, perhaps. It had certainly placed him in a position to act on an awakening. The morning after the deal was done, after all the contracts had been signed and all the lawyers placated, he’d turned to her in bed and said, “God, what now,” and she realized he didn’t know the answer. With the sale came, too, an end to the acceptable period of mourning, and Anna was increasingly expected to show up, emotionally. Her husband needed her now, who could blame him. He had gotten what he wanted and was spinning in the wake of new options.
Political dinners were rarely festive, at least according to her definition, but Anna went along as her husband had started donating to campaigns, and donations lead to dinners. This all might have been admirable but for the fact that Anna was sure he didn’t know whether he was a Democrat or a Republican. He’d never had allegiance to ideas, only to people. He tended to vote when inspired by a candidate’s charm. Noel’s view had been that politicians’ personalities were beside the point. Her husband’s view was, “What else is there?”
Anna found his new political passion both alarming and amusing, depending on the moment, on whether she felt it was evidence of crisis or of a kind of renewal. They were both growing and changing, he as a result of the sale and new prominence, she as a result of loss. And while they never discussed it, they each silently hoped their changes would run on parallel tracks and align. In a nod to that hope, they’d each decided that a baby, a real one, would be the shared goal. Parenthood’s a fine proxy in the absence of true alignment.
* * *
—
The dinner was to celebrate a former cabinet member and her memoir. Her speech was dry and Anna’s dinner partners weren’t listening. They leaned behind her and made jokes about the upcoming election, how the state had no serious candidate standing in the party of their choice. They had little interest in Anna. Across the table she could see her husband’s rapt attention to the speech. She thought about the Statue of Liberty, that crowd versus this one. She thought about the skill her husband had in moving through crowds, shedding shells or perhaps growing new ones as required. It never seemed to strike him as contradictory or cynical to spend one night with pop stars and another with politicians, while it made her feel a sense of longing for home and place, for her people, though his people were her people now, too. She wondered whether she had reached her place in life and would now rest in it, the role of good daughter gracefully having evolved into the role of good wife. She had sorted her father’s affairs. She had calmed her mother. She had chosen a husband who would love her without fail. She looked across the table at her husband and wondered what he was thinking.
“One of my professors won the Nobel for studying happiness,” the man on her right, who had gone to Princeton, said.
“I read that study, about the set points, how we each have a happiness set point,” said the man on her left.
“I think countries have happiness set points, too.”
“Well Italy’s is high, China’s is low.”
“France is very low.”
“All Europe is low, I’m afraid. Except Italy.”
“Happiness is anticipation,” said the man on her right. “Happiness is having something to look forward to, though you might just call that ignorance, or illusion—hope.” Anna looked at her husband and mouthed the words Help me.
“Respectfully, I think that’s a lie,” her husband said, speaking up across the table. It was the first thing he had said all night. “Happiness isn’t anticipation. Happiness isn’t Christmas Eve. What we want is not what comes before a thing. We may not even want the thing itself. We want what comes after. Peace, accomplishment, the chaos of new challenges. Those challenges are essential to understanding ourselves. Happiness isn’t anticipation at all. It’s the presence of new challenges that lead to self-knowledge.” He looked at Anna, and winked, and mouthed, I love you.
In that moment Anna realized she was the one spinning in place. He was moving forward. She watched him as he became the center of the table and of the evening, as he moved first to speak to the cabinet secretary, and then as her dinner partners moved to speak to him. She envied him. She wanted to find her way out of her point on that graph. Why couldn’t she just stand up, tear off her wires, and walk out?
Q.
A.
What is an absence of trust?
Trust, Lesson One.
At the Farm they used roadblocks as teaching aids to help you learn how to conceal things if you’re stopped and searched. When you encounter a roadblock, it’s all very serious and true to life, the fake police flash their lights, they remove you from your car, they cuff you. They have drug dogs, weapons dogs, explosives dogs. Sometimes they plant baking powder on you then ask why a U.S. diplomat is carrying cocaine.
I was never sure if they were testing our trust of one another or our trust of ourselves. What we trusted about one another was that we were all participating in this i
llusion with the understanding that there are limits to illusions, the understanding that no one was going to get hurt. What we trusted about ourselves was that if we felt the game wasn’t being played fairly, we would have the courage to say so.
One night a few of us came upon a roadblock. They stopped our cars and had fifteen of us lined up in cuffs along the road. They told us to kneel. Suddenly, a guy stood up, broke away from the line, and started running. Everyone was wondering, Wait, should I be running, too? The mock police released a real dog that chased him.
No one said anything. We watched him go down in the grass, and no one stood up and said, Hey, this has gone too far. We were lined up facing the field and one by one they placed us in police cars and drove us to the fake station and herded us into the fake jail. Later, we were told it was all a show. Later, we were told how that student was selected and run through rehearsals. We were told about the vest he wore to protect himself from the dog’s teeth.
* * *
—
Trust, Lesson Two.
A New York City cop shoots an unarmed boy. At the crime scene, the officers who arrive to investigate find two untraceable pistols under the body. The body is lying facedown and when the officers turn it over, they find one pistol by the boy’s chest and another by his pelvis. And they immediately understand. The first pistol is a play to save the life of the cop who has shot him. The second is insurance on the salvation. The pistols have been placed by other cops. In the station we used to say, “Place a pistol.” It meant, Secure the plan. It meant, Tie up the loose ends, watch your back, protect your team.
* * *
—
The thing is, Anna, a police officer is empowered, you’re the law, the thin blue line. Case officers are not empowered, you’re not the law, you’re running away from the law, you’re ether. You do your work and evaporate. An unarmed boy shot by a cop constitutes a crisis. When a case officer creates a crisis his colleagues rarely slip a pistol under the corpse.
An absence of trust is a fox in the henhouse, Anna. At a certain point you ask yourself whether it is more important to protect the truth or to protect the culture of trust. At a certain point you ask yourself what happens when the fox is let loose.
Cake.
“Trust me,” he said, placing his hands over her eyes. She had miscarried, and in the car home from the hospital he told the driver to keep going, and they’d driven all the way past Amagansett, almost to Montauk, a new February frost coating the trees. “Trust me.” And then he was walking behind her, his chest knocking her back, as he guided her to the little kitchen of the cottage they’d rented by the beach. “Look,” he said. And then he stopped and opened his hands to let her see and she saw that the room was dark but for the cake, its lit candles creating a picture of risk, and invitation. What was the risk. What was the invitation. He slipped his hands down to her hips and then gently but forcefully turned her to face him. He moved his hands up to her eyes, just in time to catch the tears. “Make a wish,” he said. His nose was on hers and she could feel his eyelashes, almost an Eskimo kiss. “We will get through this,” is what he told her. Because that was the risk, wasn’t it, that this time they wouldn’t get through it, that one day some fresh crisis would finally break them, belie the myth of the depth of their bond. And the invitation was for forgiveness, not of him but of the gods, of whomever it was who had delivered to them this day, this loss. Anna would accept the invitation. She would be at peace with the fact that risk is simply what we live with in love. After she blew out the candles he led her upstairs and ran her a bath. He sat by her as she bathed and then he took her to bed. In the morning when she said, right into his ear, “Hey, this is my wish,” he believed her. He found relief in making their emotional chaos Cartesian. She found relief in convincing him he could heal it all.
Q.
A.
A shiny thing is a thing everyone wants, that one brilliant recruit. There was a time when I did a lot of chasing shiny things. A lot of spotting, assessing, developing, endlessly filing reports and trace requests, dreaming up cool crypts and taking assets on outings to please and seduce them. Eventually I was given the chance to run one and only one asset. She had access to the head of Chinese intelligence. She had access because he was her father. A very shiny thing.
The rumor was that she’d been given to me as a test, that the chief was thinking to deputize me if it went well. That rumor held, and became accepted history, but it wasn’t true. The truth was your father had described me to her and she had chosen me. We were the same age. We had a similar temperament. We were both religious and had both run away from where we came from, from who we had once been. Your father had known her for a long time, and when she was ready to work for us, she went to him. He told her about me, then introduced us off-line, and he was likely the one who told the chief I was the perfect one to run her. I hadn’t spotted her, or assessed her. She had spotted and assessed me, in a way. And she would develop me, too, until it was time for her termination.
Key.
One palm open, one palm closed. The open palm was empty.
“I’ll give you another chance,” her husband said.
“How generous.” She had guessed the right hand, she always guessed the right hand first. This was a game they played—candy, theater tickets, folded love notes.
He came to her and sat by her and slowly, dramatically, opened his left palm. And there it was, a tiny gold key.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
He had bought a new home, the home they had looked at and loved but that she had said they could not afford, the one in a new neighborhood that suited his new identity, uptown, with rooms for children they didn’t yet have and a dining room for dinner parties they had never given. It had started with his saying one night that they needed a “real place,” maybe one where he didn’t line skateboards up inside the door, where books didn’t spill from shelves onto the floor in unruly piles. She was adamant against this idea of needing anything but it was increasingly hard to brook his enthusiasms. It was his money now. It would be his choice. And he had been so exceptional around her losses, why shouldn’t she be enthusiastic around his gains? This wasn’t war.
“What do you think?” he said again, leaning in to kiss her behind the ears. And Anna looked at the key and she could see the small office her father had once had, with the water cooler, and she could also see the other office, the great glass box, and she could see Noel rolling up his sleeves and strapping on his skins and she could see the men in their red jackets with the wide white crosses.
“I love you,” she said, what else could she say.
Q.
A.
Once the word was out about her, congratulatory cables came in from every office that held a stake in her case, which was every single office. In those moments you tell yourself you’ve advanced the interests of national security, despite the paperwork and the anomie, despite the kneeling at night watching a dog tackle your friend. Your father sent a note, too, though his were always handwritten. “Follow the truth,” it said. Later, once she was classified as Restricted Handling, there were no more notes, and then eventually it was clear to me that I would have to turn her over. Occasionally a turnover is a relief, assets can be exhausting, she certainly was. Though more often it’s a shock. You’re putting your baby up for adoption. You made her. She’s yours. And the letting go can prove excruciating. Though I don’t mean the letting go of the child, I mean the letting go of control. In order for everyone to feel at peace, to let go, to begin again, a turnover has to be perfect. And there is no such thing as a perfect turnover, Anna.
Falcon.
In the bedroom of the new home there was a canopy bed and twin nesting tables that had belonged to her grandmother. There was a long mirror on the wall with a chinoiserie frame her husband had brought back from a business trip. He liked standing in front of it while
holding her, “Come on, show off a little,” he would tease, which she never would.
This was where they would make a new life.
This was where she would solve the riddle.
* * *
—
Here, Anna had an office, or what her husband had called an office, a little alcove off a library. She’d never had her own space before; she was used to working at the kitchen table. He had given her a beautiful antique wooden desk, though there was nothing on it now except her laptop. When he was out she opened it and played the video again.
In its second-to-last chapter, the one after “Silencer,” the one called “Falcon,” there is a desert, and nothing but dunes. It looks like the Middle East, or Africa. It looks hot, a place best left to kings and falcons. Then a young man runs into the frame. Anna can see he is chasing something, slipping in the sand in pursuit. When the camera closes in on him he is wearing a T-shirt, and he is laughing. When Anna looks at him now she immediately sees his ten-year-old self. What preceded the dunes was a series of thirty or more scenes, starting with the monologue about God and Heaven’s rooms and followed by snatches of a life—kitchen suppers, Christmas mornings, birthdays, the presentation of a puppy, the presentation of a diploma. Which is to say, everything in every other life, the rituals we all endure and celebrate. Everything in every other life until those dunes, which were exotic, which seemed like an outlier.
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